Hefei turned a market town into a science hub
Anhui's capital counted about 9.37 million people in the 2020 census, with roughly 7.75 million in its built-up core. Once a quiet Song-dynasty administrative market of some 30,000 in the mid-1930s, it now ranks among the world's leading cities for scientific research.
The name Hefei first labelled a Han-dynasty county in the second century BCE on ground once dotted with small states and later Chu territory. In the third century CE at Xiaoyao Ford, Wei general Zhang Liao's 800 cavalry famously checked a reported 200,000-strong Wu force, opening decades of border war. Sui and Tang eras seated Lu prefecture here; the present city plan dates from the Song (960–1126), after an older Hefei farther north. After 1127 it guarded Southern Song lines against Jin invaders while trading across the frontier.
Railways briefly sidetracked the town when the 1912 Tianjin–Pukou line ran farther east, boosting Bengbu, until a 1930s link restored connections. Provincial capital status and post-war industry—Huainan coal power, a 1958 cotton mill, chemicals—multiplied population more than tenfold within twenty years of the mid-1930s. Third Front policy mattered: the University of Science and Technology of China moved to Hefei in 1970; a Chinese Academy of Sciences branch opened in 1978; electronics institutes followed from Beijing in the early 1980s.
Today the Nature Index (2025 tracking) places Hefei twelfth globally for research output, eighth in Asia-Pacific, and seventh among Chinese cities—after Beijing and Shanghai, then Nanjing, Guangzhou, Wuhan, and Hangzhou. Major campuses include USTC, Hefei University of Technology, and Anhui University. The city also hosts the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak, a superconducting magnetic-fusion experiment—an emblem of how an inland market town for grain, beans, cotton, and hemp became a laboratory capital on the Yangtze–Huai plain.
Source: Hefei
